Jersey City celebrates on Sunday, March 13th beginning
with Breakfast at Saint Peter's College, Pavonia Room 8:00 am to 9:30
am. Tickets are $8. There is a Mass scheduled at Saint Aedan's at 10:00
am sponsored by the Friendly Sons of Saint Patrick. The Parade steps-off
at 12:30 pm from Lincoln Park/Kennedy Blvd. north to Journal Square to
the reviewing stand. Click
here for full 2005 agenda

Calling Any Cop Named Patrick

Gene Scanlon (Left) and Patrick Kenny, the First Grand
Marshal of the Jersey City Saint Patrick's Day Parade on the occasion of
P. J. Kenny's return visit to Jersey City in 1998

The
annual St. Patrick's Day Parade along Kennedy Boulevard is such a
tradition in Jersey City -- with its legions of bagpipers,
shamrock-wearing priests, antique cars, Miss Colleen contestants and much
else that you might suppose it had gone on forever. In fact, it dates back
just three decades, and its beginnings were not what you might call
respectable.

It was born in the Bergen Bar on the eve of St.
Patrick's Day 1962. I should know; I was there. Five of us -- sad sons of
the Ould Sod -- were drowning our sorrows, lamenting that Jersey City,
unlike neighboring Newark and New York, did not have a big parade to honor
Ireland's patron saint.

Maybe it was the Irish in me, but more likely the
Guinness, that made me try to break up the gloom by suggesting that we
form a committee right then and there and start making plans for a big
parade the next year.

There were shouts of approval, and I was promptly named
committee chairman. After ordering a round for everybody, I began a
meeting that within minutes threatened to degenerate into a punch-throwing
donnybrook.

It started with Tom Lally's suggestion that a certain
politician be designated at the outset as the parade's grand marshal.

"You must be mad!" shouted Jim McLoughlin, slamming his
fist on the bar. "He's the biggest crook in creation!" He then named a
member of. the City Council, evoking an equally emphatic reply from Joe
(Dapper) Fallon:
"Now wouldn't that be a thundering disgrace, him marching up front, the
heathen!"

And so it went. Even Jim McCloskey's nominee, a heavy-brogued
County Corkman who was also a monsignor, was rejected out of hand. With
tempers running high by then, McCloskey might have been ejected from the
bar if he hadn't been a co-owner of the place. After a dozen or more
nominations, not one getting so much as a second, I shouted for attention
and made a proposal: "Let's call Dublin police headquarters, making it
person-to-person to any policeman named Patrick. The first one we contact,
we invite him to lead our parade. Who can argue with that?"

Nobody could, So it was that at about 9 P.M on the eve
of St. Patrick's Day 1962 (although it was already 2 A.M. on the Grand Day
itself in Ireland), a phone rang in Dublin Castle, Garda Patrick J. Kenny
answered it and accepted an invitation by the Jersey City St. Patrick's
Day Parade Committee to lead its march on Sunday, March 17, 1963. Officer
Kenny, then 41, father of six, had only one question before accepting the
invitation: "Can I bring me wife?"

P, J. and Nancy Kenny landed at Idlewild Airport on
March 7. (It became John F, Kennedy Airport after the President's
assassination eight months later.) And on St. Patrick's Day, Garda Kenny,
6 foot 3, with a red mustache and in full uniform, stepped out alone, in
military stride, leading more than 20,000 marchers. Nearly a
quarter-million spectators along the two-mile parade route cheered them
on.

The Jersey Journal said in an editorial that it was the
grandest celebration the city had ever given itself. Taverns ran out of
beer, and all-night diners ran out of food. The Kennys, who had been given
a sendoff from Ireland by President Eamon De Valera, were received in
Washington by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. (President Kennedy was in
Costa Rica.)

The Kennys still live in Rathfarnham, on the outskirts
of Dublin. A picture of them with Johnson hangs in their living room.

Last St. Patrick's Day, on one of my frequent trips to
Ireland, I watched some of the Dublin parade with P. J., and then we
headed for Mulligan's Pub, where we raised pints of lager to Tom Lally,
Jim McLoughlin, Dapper Fallon and Jim McCloskey. They're all gone now, but
34 years ago, a "no" vote by any of them would have killed the phone call
that led to a parade that is by now a grand tradition in Jersey City --
and to the adventure of a lifetime for all Irish cop named Patrick and his
wife.

Gene Scanlon, a former reporter for The Jersey
Journal and public relations director for Jersey City, was the city's
parade chairman for 14 years.